Sure, your web app might feel instantaneous when your server is sitting across the LAN, but many users have crappy Internet connections, or are downloading a Torrent, or are living in New Zealand...
Yup. New Zealand's internet speeds are just abysmal. On behalf of kiwis everywhere, can I ask that you all stop writing your own wrappers for web based videos? Instead, upload your videos to YouTube and embed that on your site. Their buffering is orders of magnitude better than some of the half baked crap I see from other people, probably because streaming video is YouTube's core business so they've focused a lot of time and attention on getting it right. If you live in urban parts of United States or Asia it's not a problem you'd notice, but for the rest of us it's a daily nuisance.